Festival Poster: MLEA and Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective Collaboration

[W]e would have coalitions. So, the Women’s Union would be in coalition with the Latinos, Mujeres Latinas en Acción, and … with the women in the Black Panthers and we would coordinate our work…. So we would know each other and we would work together....”                       –Estelle Carol, Chicago Women's Graphics Collective

This poster, designed and hand printed for the Festival, was a collaboration between Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA) and the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective. Silk-screened with a vivid yellow to orange background, the figures of women and child circling the poster also appear on festival flyers. It features the Festival’s inspiring motto, “In celebration of what we as women have done, are doing and can do/¡En celebración de lo que nosotros como mujeres hemos hecho, estamos haciendo y lo que podemos hacer!” 

“We talked about doing a poster and we wanted something a little different,” says Diana Solís. In harmony with MLEA’s multigenerational vision of Latina feminism, women of different ages and Festival organizer Diane Avila’s young daughter were selected for concept images for the poster. Diana Solís, who helped organize the Festival and who took copious photographs of MLEA and Pilsen at the time, posed and photographed several MLEA supporters on Pilsen’s 17th Street. Those who modeled joyfully and with attitude, with arms raised, hands on hips, or in motion, included Elda Chavez and “Helo” Nieto, who would become a union carpenter. Chavez, a member of the Board of Directors of El Hogar del Niño, a neighborhood daycare agency that participated in the Festival, also appears in the video (04:39) selling Festival t-shirts featuring the circle of figures.

These poses were then transformed by graphic designer Mercedes Lozano Corona into poster graphics. This poster was one of many collaborations between the largely White feminist Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective (CWGC), which had been part of the North Side’s socialist feminist Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, and Black and Latina groups in Chicago. 

MLEA connected with the CWGC through Karen Dodson, a collective member and friend of Solís. Dodson, Solís, and Diane Gómez were part of an informal circle of lesbians who “hung out” together before there were formal groups for Latina lesbians on the city—playing sports, going to bars, and making art. 

Founded in 1970, the CWGC worked collectively, so Corona is not credited as poster designer (but is thanked in the Festival program). As socialist feminists, the collective founders decided “since culture is key to women’s revolution, we needed images, we needed artists, we needed our own art. We needed that to be the publicity for this new change that was going to explode” (Carol, interview). At the time, CWGC’s high quality, affordable posters brightened and politically charged the walls of many feminist and leftist bookstores, organizations, university programs, and homes across the nation and beyond. “[T]he other mission of the Graphics Collective was to make art affordable to everyone…. we didn’t care about money—it was the message. It was projecting the ethic of women’s power to create, to recreate the world” (Carol, interview). Before the internet, collective members drove all over the country, stopping in women’s centers, bookstores, and communes to sell posters wholesale for later resale.

While most of their posters featured feminist and lesbian themes, some addressed other social justice issues and challenged imperialism. CWGC posters at the MLEA’s office around the time of the Festival included one honoring Chicago Women’s Labor History and two of their most popular posters. “Mountain Moving Day” was designed by a Detroit graphics collective; featuring a revolutionary woman with an infant on her back holding a rifle, it was based on an earlier image by Black Panther Party Minister of Culture Emory Douglas (Carol, interview). Also hanging at the MLEA office was CWGC’s iconic “Boycott Red Coach Lettuce” poster. “The farm workers poster was widely used all over the place, to promote the boycott lettuce campaign” (Carol, interview).

The CWLU had disbanded in 1976 and the CWGC in 1983; decades later, Mercedes Corona would run the She Art Store in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood with her partner Candy Johnson (Foreman 2012). The Festival de Mujeres poster still raises spirits in an office at Pilsen’s MLEA.

TO LEARN MORE about the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, here is an interview of Estelle Carol, co-founder of the CWGC in 1970, by art historian Rebecca Zorach.

And an interview with early lesbian cultural worker and poet Diane Gómez, who started spending time and working in Pilsen in the late 1970s. 

SOURCES 

Carol, Estelle, “Never the Same.” Interview by Rebecca Zorach, 2012.                                 https://never-the-same.org/interviews/estelle-carol/

Foreman, Ross. “Gay in the Life: Candy Johnson.” Windy City Times, March 28, 2012. https://windycitytimes.com/APParticle.php?AID=36980&i=42&s=Profiles

Gómez, Diane. Interview by Tracy Baim. Chicago Gay History. August 1, 2007. Video. https://www.chicagogayhistory.com/biography.php?id=511